Today's travel industry is faced with a myriad of economic and operational challenges, from price pressure to rising fuel prices, to labor issues, to competition from other carriers and alternative loyalty programs, to name a few. In recent years, airlines have turned to a variety of alternative sources of revenue such as baggage check fees, charging for meals, and charging for the use of in-flight entertainment systems. Unfortunately, many of these new fees are alienating customers who have been accustomed to receiving services such as baggage checking and meals, without having to pay extra for them. Carriers are therefore seeking out opportunities to provide services that add value to their customers' travel experience, which is expected to be much better received than tactics of exacting new fees from existing services.
Airline operators, for instance, first discovered ancillary revenue opportunities through advertising sales in their branded on-board magazines and buy-on board programs involving duty-free goods. This eventually spread to online bookings and self-check-in options. Today, airlines are using their web sites to sell seats, insurance, car rentals and hotel reservations. Others have extended this buying to on-board programs to provide a la carte meals and drinks, lottery tickets, phone cards, on-demand entertainment, and more. With the advent of on-board Wi-Fi communications airlines are moving into a position to reap more profits from their captive audiences than ever before.
Although the opportunity to tap the market of in-transit passengers has been known for decades, a number of particular challenges has prevented deployment of a commercial infrastructure to in-transit passengers. For example, crew personnel are not retail sales staff and would need to be trained to acquire retail sales skills. Also, there are practical difficulties in transacting with customers who are passengers seated throughout the airplane. Furthermore, importantly, the retail environment in a moving vehicle is dynamic, meaning that the inventory and services available for purchase are entirely dependent on the unique characteristics of each flight leg.
Another factor specific to mobile retail is that passengers are often on a travel itinerary having stopovers or changeovers, such that the particular flight on which a given passenger may be enticed to make a purchase is not the final leg of that passenger's travel. In this scenario, for items purchased on-board to be delivered at the destination point, the inventory from which a passenger may shop is unique to the passenger's itinerary.
U.S. patent application Ser. No. 12/481,505, the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein, describes a solution for linking a passenger's travel itinerary to mobile retail environments with their specific product or service offerings, and for coordinating sales, provisioning, and other critical activities in connection with conducting sales or delivery of goods and services to or from those mobile retail environments. This approach facilitates pre-ordering goods or services for delivery to the customer on a vehicle or at a destination. A Web-based application is contemplated for pre-ordering goods prior to boarding the vehicles, which is linked to a back office system that tracks flight schedules, traveler itineraries, provisioning and stocking information, etc. On board the vehicles, point-of-sale devices that can display available goods or services, guide customers through a shopping session, and even take a payment, are described. These may take the form of a hand-portable device that can be operated or brought to customers by flight attendants, or a seat-back entertainment system. These devices are updated with inventory and other relevant information whenever a network connection is, or becomes, available, such as at destination points.
One drawback with the deployment of portable in-vehicle point-of-sale systems is their limited quantity aboard any vehicle. Thus, only a small fraction of the passengers can use them to browse or purchase goods or services at any one time. Seat-back entertainment systems are more widely distributed, but only on aircraft where they are available. Thousands of older aircraft in use today do not have such systems available. Moreover, seat-back systems vary in their capabilities, with many being display-only devices lacking user interactivity capability to support a shopping session.
Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and the like, have become ubiquitous in recent years. In 2010, for example, about one-third of all mobile phones were smartphones. Smartphones are mobile devices that combine the functionality of a personal digital assistant and a mobile telephone. These devices have significant data communications and computing capability, along with a display and input device technology capable of facilitating effective user interaction with the quantity of information that the devices can support. Popular examples of smartphones include products manufactured by Research In Motion Inc. under the Blackberry® brand, the iPhone® by Apple Inc., and a variety of devices running Google's Android, Nokia's Symbian and Microsoft's Windows Phone 7, operating systems.
Although smartphones, like any other computing device with network connectivity, can be used to pre-order goods or services (prior to boarding) for later delivery in a mobile retail environment, their conventional use for shopping and placing orders while en route is limited to only those flights where Internet connectivity is available. In reality, Internet service is not currently available on all aircraft and all airlines. When it is available, there is typically a charge to access the service, which may dissuade certain users. Additionally, there are practical bandwidth limitations or limitations on the number of users that can be supported at any given time on a flight. Accordingly, although it is likely that a majority of passengers on a flight are carrying a smartphone, there is currently a lost opportunity to leverage that technology in order to facilitate the sale of goods or services through such devices on-board.